DistributionWatch: Another Tip of the Red Hat - Examining Red Hat 7.3

Overview and Installation

June 14, 2002

By
Bill von Hagen

Because I tend to focus on the commercial and personal use of Linux as
a full-time operating system, Red Hat has been my favorite x86 Linux
distribution for years now. Yet even I greet each Red Hat release with
a strange mixture of anticipation and fear, since everyone knows that
Red Hat has made some spectacularly questionable decisions in past
releases. Many people tend to avoid Red Hat's x.0 releases since they
always seem a bit rough around the edges. Red Hat's premature
incorporation of a development version of gcc (2.96) is an albatross
that they are still dragging along into new releases today.

Part of the global awareness of Red Hat's successes and mistakes is due
to their prominence in the Linux market - Red Hat has clearly won the
Linux branding wars in the public's eyes, at least in the United
States. As the best known Linux distribution, Red Hat is therefore
more quickly slapped under a microscope to expose both features and
flaws than any other Linux distribution. Which is exactly the point of
this article - what's new and improved in Red Hat 7.3, and is Red Hat
7.3 a distribution that you should consider upgrading to?

Red Hat 7.3 provides no surprises to anyone who has installed earlier
Red Hat 7.x distributions. By default, Red Hat 7.3 uses the same
framebuffer-based X Window system graphical installer as previous
releases. A text-only installation mode is also available for The
graphically challenged, as well as a Kickstart installation mechanism
that makes it easy for you to automate installing Red Hat in exactly
the same way on multiple systems. This section describes the default
graphical installer.

After asking the standard sorts of questions about your keyboard,
language preferences, and mouse, Red Hat 7.3 offers a variety of
installation classes. These consist of pre-selected groups of packages
that are oriented towards workstations, servers, laptops, upgrading
from a previous version of Red Hat, and my favorite, the Custom
class, in which you can customize the list of packages that you want
to install.

My favorite customization option is "Everything" which does exactly
what the name suggests. In these days of relatively large disk drives,
I'd rather install a few packages that I may not even know about than
have to sift through the installation CDs to install and test some
cool new utility that I happened to hear about. This will remain my
favorite installation option as long as disk size stays ahead of Linux
distribution size - which isn't guaranteed, given that the standard
Red Hat 7.3 binary distribution now spans 3 CDs. Red Hat seems
interested in challenging SuSE's title as the most expansive Linux
distribution, and more power to them. I buy pre-packaged Linux
distributions to get as much pre-compiled, pre-tested software as I
can.

Once you've selected the class of installation that you want to
perform and the packages, if necessary, the next step in the
installation process is disk partitioning, which (in graphical mode)
provides Red Hat's excellent Disk Druid package, which is only
available during installation. Red Hat could win a few points from
anyone who has to partition disks if they released a standalone
version of Disk Druid, since it is both graphical and eminently
usable, but perhaps they're too busy complaining about Sun and
Microsoft.

A significant drawback of Disk Druid is that it only supports the
ext2, ext3, and vfat filesystems. Its support for software RAID
during installation is broken (though you can always do this after
installing Red Hat 7.3, using standard Linux fdisk and the md/lvm
tools. Fans of journaling filesystems will be disappointed - if you're
a ReiserFS, JFS, or XFS fan, those simply are not options, which isn't
all that surprising since Red Hat was the primary sponsor of the ext3
development effort. In Red Hat's defense, JFS and XFS have only been
"officially" incorporated into the 2.5 development kernel, but I would
have expected to at least see the ReiserFS in there, since it's been
in the kernel forever.

The next few installation steps are Boot Loader Configuration (both
GRUB and LILO are supported), Network Configuration, and Firewall
Configuration, in which you can specify a default security level,
specify trusted devices and the types of incoming connections and
ports that you want to enable, and so on. Though Firewall
Configuration has been a part of the Red Hat installation process
since at least 7.2, Red Hat still deserves kudos for adding it in the
first place, since this helps make Red Hat installations more secure
out of the box.

The last few installation steps are Language Selection, Account
Configuration, Authentication Configuration (supporting NIS, LDAP,
Kerberos, and SMB, plus the standard MD5/shadow password options),
Package Selection (only if you've specified the custom installation
class), and initial Video Configuration. After installing the packages
that you've selected or which are associated with the installation
class you selected, the installer completes your X Window system
configuration and lets you select the desktop that you want to use.

A nice addition here would be automatic support for just using an X
Window system window manager rather than a complete desktop
environment - even the laptop installation only lets you choose
between GNOME and KDE. Support for a "Window-Manager Only"
installation or a light-weight desktop such as XFCE would be a nice
thing to add, though perhaps this would confuse more people than it
would benefit.

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